A Smile the Eyes Agree With

How it works

Your portrait is scaled to about one and a fifth megapixels and repainted at a denoise noticeably higher than the other portrait pages, with a fresh seed each run. The instruction describes a whole-face change rather than a mouth change: lift the cheeks, narrow the eyes slightly, allow the lines beside them to appear, and make the mouth and the eyes agree.

The negative prompt leads with the failure this page exists to avoid — a mouth only smile — followed by staring eyes, an uncanny expression, a forced grin, and changed teeth.

The eyes go first

Watch someone react to something funny and the order is fixed. The eyes narrow, the cheeks come up, and the mouth follows. The muscle responsible circles the eye socket and is largely outside voluntary control, which is why people find it hard to fake a convincing smile on demand and easy to spot one that has been faked.

That gives a viewer a reliable test they apply without effort: does the upper half of the face confirm what the lower half is claiming? A photograph where it does not is not read as a slightly imperfect smile. It is read as a person who is not actually happy, or as an image that has been altered, and both are worse than the neutral expression you started with.

So the useful design rule is that a smile tool is really an eye tool with a mouth attached, and this workflow is written that way.

The lines you spent the last page removing

There is a direct contradiction between this page and the wrinkle page and it is worth naming.

The wrinkle page softens the fan of lines beside the eye. This page needs that fan to appear, because it is the visible evidence of the muscle that makes a smile real.

Both are correct in their own context, and running them in sequence is a mistake. If you smooth the eye corners and then add a smile, the pass has to reinstate exactly what was just taken out, and what it reinstates is generated rather than yours. Pick one operation for a given photograph.

If you want both a smile and softer skin, do the expression first and go gently afterwards.

Whose photograph is it

The technical part of this page is straightforward. The rest is not, and it is short.

A portrait of yourself is yours to adjust. A photograph of a group at an event records something that happened, and changing how a person in it looked changes what it records. Family photographs get shared, reused, and eventually treated as evidence of what a day was like, and someone who was actually miserable that afternoon may not want a version of themselves enjoying it in circulation.

Ask. It takes less time than the run.

Publication gate

This page ships once the workflow has been run against a neutral headshot, an already forced smile, a portrait wearing glasses, and a subject at a three quarter angle, confirming in each case that the eye region changes together with the mouth and that the teeth are unaltered.